Oat milk is milk

[GCBear]

Milk has lost all meaning
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/03/plant-based-soy-oat-milk-fda-definition/673306/

"Differentiating plant-based milk and milk requires defining what milk actually is, but doing so is at odds with the acknowledgment that plant-based milk is milk."

(I think I might be spending too much time lurking on this board. 😂)

Oak milk is lovely,and the dairy industry is cruel.

Oh God. Between this and having the new and exciting lesbian umbrella (and flag) graphic inflicted on me to prove that homosexual women are only one tiny, tiny facet of lesbianism, and most of it is trans related and very definitely nothing to do with being female, I want somewhere to live behind high walls with guards on the gate.

They can all fuck off with this never ending attention seeking exhausting bloody twattery with words and leave me in peace.

Oat milk usually has seed oils, like rapeseed oil in it. Seed oils are almost certainly utterly fucking dire for our health. Full fat dairy on the other hand is an amazing food, so,so good for humans with lactase tolerance,which is most ethnic northern Europeans. Buy from ethical farmers if you are worried about the dairy industry. I'm not particularly here tbh.

Oh good god.

Seed oils are not bad for you. The dose makes the poison. As with all things

joinzoe.com/learn/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you.amp

Best not have any coconut milk then!! Coconuts don't lactate as far as I'm aware.

Full fat is amazing

Milk*

I get it.

It can be 'milk style' or 'milk substitute' but it's clearly not actual milk 🙄

I don't think they are allowed to call it milk anyway - none of the alternative products have the word 'milk' in their name on the packaging. Things like lactomilk can themselves a 'milk drink', but things like oat are just a 'drink'

I'm not sure I see it as a specially feminist issue though, but canning then milks does distort reality, and that is becoming an issue in feminism...

The word milk has long been used in the natural world to describe white liquids other than the output of lactating mammals. Coconut milk for one, or liquids oozing out of plants. It’s always had multiple meanings. Not a gotcha.

Maybe like “transwoman” the solution is a compound word “plantmilk.”

Not milk, but an alternative interpretation of it.

Coconut and soy milks have has been around a long time without confusion. As has peanut butter.

'Oat milk' is presumably more marketable than 'gruel' which is kind of what it is.

The dairy industry is literal exploration of female animals' bodies. They repeatedly impregnate them, separate them from their babies and kill them when their bodies can't cope with more pregnancies and stop producing unnatural amounts of milk.

The natural feminist stance would be to acknowledge that cows are exploited due to their sex and what their bodies provide. It's misogyny personified and so therefore not a very feminist stance to support it.

I'm not saying you have to be vegan btw, just that 'jokes' about how delicious milk is and how plant milks shouldn't be named thus are not feminist in nature so belong on aibu rather than fwr.

Oat milk is used as a direct replacement for cow milk so why not use the same word?! I mean, it says oat/almond/coconut/soya/hemp etc before the word milk so it's hardly going to be confused as the teat-based kind, is it?!

Millions of us who use it don't do so by choice - we just react badly to cows milk but still need something on our cereal and in our coffee. Do we really need a new word for it?!

The people who get worked up about this probably get triggered by a vegetarian sausage not meeting the dictionary definition of a sausage🙄

I think we need these definded.

If it had been the other way round and something that had always been suitable for a vegan was labeled as such say an onion bhaji was found to be stuffed with meat inside, would vegans not scream, and rightly so, just because meat eaters also eat vegetables does not mean mislabling is fair.

I find it hard to believe that the naming of this product is more important to anyone than the cruelty and exploitation of female cows and their reproductive cycle.

As a vegan of many, many years, I try not to call these products milk any more, ever since the time a very stupid male vegan told me human babies could be fed on standard "soya milk" because it was a milk.

It's not. It's plant juice. It's plant juice I enjoy drinking, but you cannot use it to feed a newborn human baby unless you want to starve her or him. I breastfed, but if I hadn't been able to, i would have turned to cows' milk-based formula!

In the UK and the EU it's against the law to label oat milk / vegan cheese / cream etc as milk, cheese or cream (or other dairy words) because those terms have legal definitions. The things made from plants don't meet those definitions. It's why when you buy a block of cheese it says 'ingredients: cheese' not 'milk, salt and bacteria'.

That's why things like oatly say 'oat drink' on the packaging.

Personally I like oat milk, but I also like cheese. And rapeseed oil is evil stuff, it kills wild bees that rely on their own honey to survive the winter. They prefer oilseed rape flowers above all others, but the honey they make from it crystallises in winter and then they starve to death.

I have nothing against vegan or vegetarian alternatives, quite like a lot of them, but saying one thing is cruel and another not is not necessarily true. Quite often animals, sometimes big ones like baby deer, pheasants, pet cats, are caught by the combine harvester when they hide from the big noisy machine in the crop field and are killed in horriffic ways. Small animals like mice and small birds are killed in their 100s and 1000s in every field. Literally nothing is vegan.

Just call all dairy lactation and all the plant stuff milk.
every lactation substance is species and infant-specific. Very cruel. I still eat cheese I just realise I'm a terrible person.

Why does it need to be called milk when it's not?
What's wrong with calling it oat juice, oat water etc?

@GrannyAchingsShepherdsHut - where did you find out about the crystallising honey thing, please?

I once heard almond/hazelnut versions described as nutjuice. I do think the word milk should be reserved for mammal milks. Both actual cow’s milk and plant based substitutes can be great foods, but their nutritional profiles are not similar at all for the most part, and it’s not helpful for people to think that their 1yr old should be drinking oat milk and not full fat cows milk, for example.

Oat milk is not milk

it needs to be clearly labeled and differentiated because mixing up dairy milk and the assorted things people try to pass for milk these days can have deadly consequences.

It's not. It's plant juice. It's plant juice I enjoy drinking, but you cannot use it to feed a newborn human baby unless you want to starve her or him. I breastfed, but if I hadn't been able to, i would have turned to cows' milk-based formula!

Well the reason for that is NO MILK including whole cow's milk is suitable for infants. Formula is specifically formulated for infants and yes, brand like Wy Soy are nutritionally sound for a growing infant and especially useful for allergy and intolerance.

Older children should not be having barista oat milk etc as the only milk made nutritionally for age 2-5 is Alpro Growing Up milk as specifically made with appropriate minerals and vitamins in mind.

Cow's milk is made to turn a baby cow into a Hiefer. Not ideal for humans.

Are we going to include my favourite, Avène Milk Cleanser as not being milk!
Of course its not milk. Milk is used as an adjective to describe how it looks, same presumably as the tins of coconut milk in my cupboard.